EVSN: Escape Velocity Space News

As the Thanksgiving leftovers reach the stage of possibly gaining intelligence in the back of our refrigerators, we’re going to take a look at the origins of life, how we might find simple life on ic…

When we headed into recording this episode, I didn’t know if there would be a government shutdown or not, and I have to admit, on Saturday, September 30, I spent more than a few hours binge-watching …

Researchers currently think solar maximum - when the Sun is most active - will occur sometime in late 2024 to early 2025. With this cycle, we will experience just what a good blast of solar radiation…

We keep tweaking our format a little bit every episode, trying to find the right mix for YouTube, podcasts, and now, short-form video. We think we the setup is on the mark now and thank you for your …

There are some news cycles that are just plain weird, and this news cycle tried really, really hard to be one of them. Headlines last week highlighted that JWST observed methane and carbon dioxide in…

Dr. Pamela is big on volcanoes, and she hoped we’d have an awesome new eruption to report, but we don't. There is, however, still a lot of news this week that doesn’t include an Iceland eruption. Ins…

In this week's episode, we look at the upcoming solar maximum, how solar activity affects Neptune, the robotic invasion fleet on Mars, and how some of the weirdest star systems in reality have been a…

This episode reminds you to look up, look out, and reflect on what we see around us. Stories cover a weird white dwarf that is doing things our Sun may do billions of years from now, how satellite im…

According to satellite cataloger Jonathan McDowell, there are now 18 satellite constellations, like Starlink, being planned. These constellations will contain 543,811 satellites. This is a whole lot …

In today’s episode, we’re going to look at everything from how past Earth couldn’t support photosynthesis because the days were just too short, to current Earth letting us get hit by more Cosmic Rays…

Each week, when we set off to do this show, we start with one core idea: We want to tell you what is new in space and astronomy… and remember Earth is a planet too. When we select stories, we try to …

In this episode, we need to take one of our periodic looks at our planet's science and understand what it means to life as we know it. But we will only look at Earth for the first two segments. Then …

Space science isn’t where the money is… at least not yet. Astronomy and planetary science in the U.S. are funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and a variety of smaller foundations and ext…

In this episode, we’re going to look at how we now work to understand the history of life - including human life - on Earth by studying the geology of our planet, and we’re going to take those lesson…

In this episode, we’re going to be talking more about meteors - including the source of the Geminids meteor shower, asteroid Phaethon - as well as hot planets, hungry black holes, and how we’re worki…

While we could spend an entire episode on Earth, there is just too much going on in the universe to linger anywhere too long. From our world, we journey out to look at the super massive black hole in…

This episode features the kind of news week where we looked at the April 20th eclipse in the South Pacific and decided it just wasn’t a huge priority. Between watching Starship's “will it won’t it” l…

For decades now, our planetary science news cycles have been dominated by Mars. Mars is relatively close, and we have a lot of experience landing there and science goals to pursue. But it has left ou…

Humans are the ultimate pattern matchers - at least for now. I have to admit I’m looking forward to the day I can give some new AI a set of images and ask it to tell me what animals it can find among…

Right now, humans are tantalizingly close to being able to search for life on other worlds where it is reasonable to think life could exist. We can’t do it yet - at least not in a way that would be s…